tim's experiment

ATV, for overseas readers, is one of Hong Kong’s two terrestrial television stations. It is the second station. Long ago it was a cable station. Then the other lot, TVB, started a free-to-air service. By the time ATV realised that people were not going to pay for something which someone else was offering free it was too late. TVB was the station most people watched and so it has remained ever since. One of the theories advanced to explain this that the shops used to sell TVs pre-tuned to TVB’s Chinese channel and most consumers never learned how to change it. This is difficult to believe. I am more inclined to the theory that the design of public housing flats made it necessary for everyone to watch the same channel. Most estates had, and have, communal corridors with everyone’s front doors opening on to them. The only way to get any natural ventilation is to leave the front door open, and most flats are fitted with metal grills so this can be done without inviting passers-by in. But this arrangement means that in any flat you can hear at least six televisions, and if they were tuned to different programmes it would spoil it for everyone.

Anyway there we have it. TVB has historically made money and ATV has historically lost it. One of the results of this has been a constant succession of owners, not all of whom were the sort of people you would want as a son-in-law. Another consequence is that the English channel (both stations are required by their franchises to offer an English channel) is the television equivalent of Walmart. Everything it shows is either dirt cheap or paid for by someone else. The station has a nice line in American evangelicals of the sort who occasionally delight non-believers by being caught with their fingers in the till or their private parts in places they are not married to. Of course they pay the station to show their stuff. This looks awfully similar to advertising but it would be churlish to complain in the financial circumstances.

However lately a strange twist has appeared in this story. The people who run Hong Kong football (a bunch of quarrelsome millionaires) have persuaded the government that the absence of decent football in our city is a serious deficiency worthy of repair with public money. Hong Kong has a flourishing amateur soccer scene but the standard of the professional league is low and attendances are accordingly small. One of the things the football people decided to do with this avalanche of other people’s gold was to pay a television station to cover football. They asked both stations how much they would charge to do this job and took the cheapest offer, which was from ATV. This is a puzzling decision on several levels. One is of course that as few people watch ATV the soccer supremos are not going to get much for their money. Apparently TVB asked for a million or so more, and well they might. Another question is whether this will work. After all it is not what happens in other places. Elsewhere the television people pay for the right to televise sport. Evidently people who are keen on a sport develop a taste for watching it on television. Whether seeing it on television will produce a taste for live attendance is another matter.

The problem is that it will not, of course, be the only football that people can see on television. There is a familiar story that modern technology produces winner-takes-all situations where previously prosperity was spread around. Live musicians used to be able to ply their trade knowing that their internationally famous rivals could only be in one place at once and that was unlikely to be just down the road. Nowadays live music has to compete with recordings made miles away by people in other countries, and indeed people who are now dead. So it is harder to make a living than it used to be. Watching football live provides some special attractions in terms of atmosphere and fresh air. Watching it on television, on the other hand, invites comparisons with other games you can watch on television. This will bring the local rubbish into competition with leagues in places like Europe and South America where the football is much more skilful and exciting. So I am not optimistic. ATV does not seem to have much idea about football, actually. On the English channel they are currently touting a new acquisition: games from Scotland! Apparently nobody has told them that there are only two big clubs in Scotland: the Glasgow ones – with occasional competition from Aberdeen if that club is having a good year. So most of the matches are either one-sided or not very good.

It is tempting to see some nefarious political factors at work here. The way in which the Chinese authorities have stifled press freedom in Hong Kong is to get cooperative rich people to buy up media organisations, and make the journalists follow the party line. Often the resulting decline in quality and trustworthiness results in the newspaper or magazine losing money, in which case the owner can close it. He has done his duty. An independent voice has been silenced. The problem with ATV is that if its luckless but politically well-connected owners let the thing go bankrupt then the franchise will be offered to someone else. So they have to keep it going somehow. The government gives money to the football people. The footballers give it to ATV. How nice for everyone concerned. Except us viewers.